ROME — In the cage fight of American presidential politics, the matchup is irresistible: Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, the pope of the poor who has knelt to wash the feet of prisoners and Muslims, versus Donald J. Trump, billionaire Republican who disparages Muslims and kneels to no one.
When Francis suggested that Mr. Trump “is not Christian” in answering a reporter’s question during his return flight from Mexico, the Latin American pope not only served up red meat for global headline writers (“Francis Excommunicates Trump,” declared La Stampa in Italy), but again demonstrated his knack for sticking his nose into putatively secular affairs. His flap with Mr. Trump is about immigration, and to Francis the issue transcends any campaign cycle.
From the first days of his papacy, when he insisted on paying his hotel bill himself, Francis has understood the power of a gesture, and of a global spotlight available to any pope capable of using it. The pontiff who made a politically charged visit to the United States-Mexico border on Wednesday is the same one who in 2014 stopped in Bethlehem to pray at the graffiti-covered wall dividing the Palestinian city from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem.
His critics in the United States, many of them conservative Catholics, argue that Francis is a “political pope” pursuing a leftist agenda that castigates capitalism and environmental degradation. Even before Francis’s remarks about him, Mr. Trump had criticized the pope as “a political person” and accused him of visiting the border as a favor to the Mexican government.
That would probably be a surprise to the Mexican government, judging from Francis’s six-day swing through the country. Every day, Francis spoke of the malaise in Mexican society, the lack of jobs and education for the young, the horrific violence of the drug cartels. His itinerary was a tour of political failure and social injustice: slums, the heartland of exploited indigenous communities and a divided border
The Francis-versus-Trump dynamic is undeniably a made-for-media clash. But overlooked in that frame is that each man has diagnosed the same currents in society, fishing for followers in seas churning with anger, dislocation, spiritual alienation and economic inequality. Seen from Europe, Mr. Trump is an amplified version of angry populists like Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader in France, playing to fears about migrants, Islam and economic stagnation.
“Trump is the leader of a populism that’s growing: a cultural industry that has imitators in many countries in Eastern Europe, above all, but also in France, Italy, Denmark, Scandinavia,” Massimo Franco, a columnist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, wrote on Friday.
“It expresses a resentment and hatred towards the ‘foreigner’ born of fear and economic insecurity,” Mr. Franco added. “Trump becomes the metaphor of an egotistical and racist Christianity, which for the pope represents an unacceptable oxymoron.”
Giovanni Maria Vian, the editor in chief of the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said every pope was “both religious and political.” Pope John Paul II was a famously political pope for his role during the Cold War in bringing down the Iron Curtain that divided East from West. Francis, born in Argentina, has a different focus.
“Francis’s walls are between the north and south of the world, and that’s why they bother him,” Mr. Vian said in a telephone interview. “His reactions are moral, not political.”
Yet he has inevitably strayed into the political realm, as he critiques society, and no doubt deliberately. While populists like Mr. Trump and Ms. Le Pen partly blame foreigners for inequities, Francis points to structural inequities deriving from the global capitalist order. His speeches about the excesses of capitalism, often sprinkled with Old Testament fury, divide the world between exploiters and the exploited.
“God will hold the slave drivers of our day accountable,” Francis said in a speech to workers and business owners in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as he called for greater Christian ethics in business. “The flow of capital cannot decide the flow and life of people.”
More
than anyone, Mr. Trump symbolizes the excesses of capitalism, yet
Vatican officials on Friday emphasized that the pope was not personally
attacking Mr. Trump, nor trying to influence American voters.
“The
pope said what we all know, when we follow his teaching and his views:
that we should not build walls but bridges,” a Vatican spokesman, the
Rev. Federico Lombardi, told Vatican Radio. “It’s his general position,
and it is coherent with what it means to courageously follow the
indications of the Gospel, of acceptance and solidarity.”
Indeed,
the pope’s overarching message is to call on all Christians to be more
Christian, including those high up in the hierarchy of the Roman
Catholic Church. He has repeatedly challenged his own bishops to be
humbler, to get out onto the streets and to be more compassionate. His
economic critique is also a moral one, as he laments a “throwaway
culture” in which poor people and migrants are collateral damage. By
contrast, Mr. Trump likes to divvy people up as winners and losers.
In
his final Mass celebrated along the Mexican border, Francis told the
biblical story of the city of Nineveh, which was “self-destructing as a
result of oppression and dishonor, violence and injustice.” God sent a
messenger, Jonah, to warn people and the local king that they must
change how they treat one another or the city would be destroyed. The
king listened, and Ninevah was saved.
“He sent him to wake up a people intoxicated with themselves,” Francis said.
It is hard not think that Francis sees his job as exactly the same.
Sunday, 21 February 2016
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